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We asked you to send us your stories about being truly unstoppable lesbian moms, and the following essay by Lynne Marie is our contest winner! Thank you to everyone who submitted essays — you all are seriously unstoppable, and brilliant and inspiring and I want to be your best friend and hear all your stories all the time. —Laneia

I can’t remember if it was the first shipment of sperm that got stuck in California or if we’d already tried once by then.

It seems like I’d remember. But those early days just blur together now.

Even the middle days are not so clear. That time we tried in the doctor’s office in the middle of the workday? We’d been at it more than a year already. I wore a navy linen dress and came back to campus afterward to meet with my new boss. Did the semen really trickle down my crotch as I set my face in a shape of curious attentiveness? It seems unlikely, what with the vial being smaller than a thimble and the insemination having gone directly into my uterus. But I remember stickiness and linen, the bruised internal feeling that follows a speculum, and my desperate lack of interest in anything but the collision of sperm and egg.

The weekend the sperm got lost, Peach brought Tizzy up from New York to visit. I told Liz that Tizzy was our London friend who came to the states all the time to visit her various lovers and friends from college, when she travelled the U.S. as a footballer. I didn’t tell her how attractive and funny and flirty Tizzy was. It was fun to see Liz blanch as they came off the bus.

“You didn’t tell me she was cute,” she snipped.

It would have been a good weekend if I hadn’t had a god-awful cold, if we hadn’t decided to stop eating everything delicious — wheat, dairy, meat — if I wasn’t so worried about the damned sperm. At lunch at P&E’s I ordered the hummus platter without the whole wheat roll, even though everybody knows the whole wheat roll is the best thing on the menu. I was so congested all I could taste was the lemon I squeezed onto everything. I was so feverish I wondered how I was going to walk home.

I kept thinking, “I only get to see Tizzy every few years, I should be enjoying this more.”

I kept thinking, “I wonder where my damned sperm is?”

I left Peach and Tiz in town with Liz and went home to hunt down my sperm. It should have been waiting for me in our back hall on Friday, and here it was Saturday and no one knew where it was. I called the nice girls at the sperm bank again. Finally someone called me back.

“We found it,” she said. “It’s at the Oakland Airport.”

Whenever I think about that shipment, I imagine a silver canister of liquid nitrogen tagged with universal biohazard labels circling endlessly on a baggage carousel, all the other luggage anxiously pulling away from it.

Most of the lesbians I know got pregnant on the first try. This is not actually normal but it kept happening, so it seemed normal. Also all of the women in my department at the University got pregnant. We laughed at staff meetings and said, “It must be in the water.”

I drank the water, but I didn’t get pregnant on the first try. Or the second or third, either.

The process of figuring out when to buy the sperm was challenging. I had to take my vaginal temperature every day and track it on some kind of chart. Also, there was a very fancy ovulation predictor we bought at Walmart that tracked things automatically. We hated to buy anything at Walmart, but that’s where the fancy ovulation predictors were, so we braved the bright lights and wide aisles.

I had to pee on a special stick every day during the middle weeks of my cycle then push the pee-stick into a slot in the computer. It would tell me whether or not I was ovulating. It could tell me when I was approaching ovulation. But it couldn’t ever tell me exactly how many more days it would be before I ovulated. So I still had to guess about when the sperm should come out of the freezer in Oakland, be placed into the canister of liquid nitrogen, and get sent to the airport.

Samantha gave me a hard time about buying the ovulation predictor and the pee-sticks at Walmart. “I bet you could order them online,” she said, after I’d concluded I couldn’t. She’d put a fair amount of energy into trying to fight Walmart coming to her little town and they’d come anyway, so I wanted to cut her some slack.

But I had to think: “You can get sperm from that husband of yours any time you want. I’ve got one chance a month and I’m gonna be damned sure it gets here on the right day.”

A year after we hooked up, Liz and I stuffed her belongings into a rental car and drove over the bridge to my apartment in Brooklyn so we could bank her rent and plot our escape from New York. It wasn’t long after that until we borrowed my dad’s wood-paneled station wagon and drove out to see a financial advisor in some leafy Connecticut suburb. He came highly recommended by an evangelical Christian on my job. He assumed that we would adopt in a future so distant we didn’t need to start saving for it, but that we’d need a $30,000 car soon. Our combined income was under $100,000. We set up bank drafts that sucked most of both paychecks into mutual funds every week.

Liz flattened a woodchuck driving home from the Christian financial adviser’s office. She couldn’t swerve without causing an accident on the parkway, so she aimed that tank of a car right over its doomed, slow-moving bulk with tears streaming down her face.

There is a sperm bank within 100 miles from our home, an entirely drivable distance, but it didn’t have an identity release program. The identity release bank we chose, over three thousand miles away, offered the largest available catalog of sperm donors willing to be contacted by their future progeny upon the child’s 18th birthday at the child’s request. These donors’ vials had a surcharge for the privilege of an option that might never be taken. In the online catalog these donors are marked “yes” in the identity release field. We came to think of them as “yes donors.”

I’m supposed to say that there are lots of ways to make a family — that “yes donors” are right for some families and “no donors” for others, and some dykes just get knocked up by a good friend or neighbor, and that’s a great choice too. But there was never any choice about it for me. I could not know my donor. I did not want even the shadow of a parent other than me or Liz. I feared the whispering presence of grandparents or siblings. I wanted legal-clad certainty that he could never initiate a shift from donor to dad.

I wanted him to be sure, as sure as a person can possibly be, that he was just giving me sperm. Even if what I got was was a baby.

But as deeply as I knew that I wanted to be knocked up by a stranger, I had no idea what my kid — my imagined, wished for, yet un-conceived kid — might want. What if he wanted a father? What if she needed another family? What if my child was so different from me that he needed to know the other side of the equation, where his personality originated? What if she was so curious that she couldn’t stand part of her own self being a mystery?

What if, in some future so far away I couldn’t even imagine it, my child—a person who didn’t even exist yet needed to know?

The Zen koan asks, “What was the shape of your face, before your mother or father was born?”

Lynne Marie Wanamaker is an anti-violence educator, a writer, a graduate student, a lay-preacher and a mama. She lives with her wife and daughter in an old house in New England. She identifies as a cisgendered white queer of working class origin and is grateful to Autostraddle for helping her rock a fluid gender presentation. Lynne Marie writes about self defense at Ms. Fit: Real World Feminist Fitness and is the lead author of the Say Something Superhero Field Guide: A Manual for Eliminating Interpersonal Violence. Find her at www.lmwsafe.com.

Thanks for being brave and generous in sharing your experiences in becoming a Mum. You write beautifully and convey what you are “up against” in attempting to get pregnant with a lot of truth and compassion.

This is such a well written, powerful piece of writing! I enjoyed hearing your story and went along for the whole ride with you. Your writing voice is so strong. I’m happy that in the end everything worked out for you. Thanks for sharing.

Damn, that entire experience sounds extremely stressful, like it was a nightmare. I appreciated the little bits of humor throughout your post, though, that added a dash of levity to the harrowing depiction of what you were going through logistically and medically. And I’m glad that you persevered and in the end got what it was you so deeply wanted!

I will say I personally would have preferred not to see the gender essentialist assumptions that cropped up in a couple of your paragraphs. I can’t really fault you, though, because this IS your story and you obviously need to honestly relate what is was like for you. Also, your gender essentialism is no more extreme than that of pretty much anyone else who writes about sperm donation. It does come with the territory, but I still figured it wouldn’t hurt for me to mention my view on it.

And women (and other non-men) can be sperm donors, too. So, access to the sperm donor would not necessarily result in a father, and all of this referring to the unknown donor as a dude could be totally inaccurate.

Oooookay.
So I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but as someone who has donated her eggs, I kind of doubt that a sperm donation agency would accept sperm from a trans woman/non-binary sperm-having person. Gay men are not allowed to donate per the FDA, so I’m sure that if a trans woman is straight the agency would view it the same way? Also, taking hormones would probably also disqualify a person from donating. These agencies don’t just accept anyone’s sperm (same for egg donors). They have a whole list of disqualifications, and they can refuse anyone for any reason they want. So the chances of a sperm-having person donating sperm while living as a woman is very very small. I mean, maybe you’re talking about sperm donors who transition after they donate? Because that’s plausible, I guess.
For the record, it’s a lot tougher to donate eggs as a lesbian, too, and I’m almost 100% sure egg donation agencies would not accept eggs from a trans guy.

I don’t know about Shaed, Woya, but I’m personally already well aware of what you’re saying. And honestly, I don’t need a non-trans woman teaching me about the nature of my own oppression. (I’m not sure exactly how Shaed identifies, but they appear to be trans* also according to their profile.)

For the record, “sperm donation” doesn’t just refer to sperm banks. There are plenty of person-to-person, private donations between people who know each other (although I’m aware that to many cis dykes the concept of “knowing” a trans woman–as opposed to just talking about us in one’s queer studies class–sounds pretty strange and foreign). But anyway, all you really need for this to work is a syringe–which is pretty easy to get–and a trans woman to donate sperm, a trans woman who you like and trust.

Which again, is where the problem generally arises for most cis queers.

Thank you, you’ve successfully scared me away from attempting to carry a baby. I always thought it would be me, but now…I don’t know. My mother said the women in my family get pregnant at the thought of having sex, so I’m going to hope I take after them when or if that time comes.

Thank you for your generous comments. I am so happy to share this story.

Rebecca, I am interested to know more specifically about the specific “gender essentialist assumptions” you reference. As we say in our family, “everybody has things they are good at and everybody has working-on things.” Achieving a more complex understanding of gender–my own and the spectrum–is surely one of my “working-on” things. In that regard, I’m in a different place now than I was when I wrote this essay, and even more different than when I went through this experience. For example, in talking about my not-yet-conceived child I used the pronouns “he” and “she” as if that was inclusive. Today I’d probably use “they.” But that was accurate to my thinking then. I’m not sure how you are supposed to handle that in memoir.

It’s also true that the context of the whole assisted-fertility/sperm donation adventure, especially the medical aspects, was profoundly gender- and hetero-normative. I hope some of the alienation I felt as a queer in that context came through.

And, I wanted to tell Jessie–yes, the process of getting knocked-up was scary, confusing, frustrating, sad, painful, expensive and long. It tested my faith and determination, but that’s what makes those things stronger, right? This essay is only part of the story–maybe the smallest part. I loved being pregnant. I found childbirth a profoundly transcendent experience. And motherhood is the greatest journey of my life. I am humbled and exalted by it every day, sometimes in the same moment.

Well, Lynn Marie, I thought your essay was very good and engrossing. I’m not interested in really distracting from it by getting into some sort of in-depth discussion about gender. But the short of it is: not all sperm donors are guys. I’m not sure if you are aware of this fact or not, but no awareness of it is conveyed in your essay. Which is fine. It’s your life, and you can write about it in whatever you want, in whatever way is accurate to your experience.

Cheers for this, Lynne Marie / Autostraddle. Once you make the thoughtful decision to become a parent it’s hard to know where to begin – as a lesbian.

I’m in the early stages of this and it is so overwhelming. Full of advice from a heteronormative perspective, awkward conversations with strangers and serious expense (and discrimination) if you need fertility treatment…

Not to mention the fear of dealing with medical people when you are (considered) “technically” a virgin. Also transvaginal ultrasounds 🙁 The near silence surrounding the intricacies of this process, for your average ‘gold star’ lesbian makes it scary and isolating.

LGBT / feminist circles seem to pander to those who either love to pretend they hate babies, or those who are personally repelled by any conversation that connects women with reproduction. I’d like to see this attitude evolve, as it is doing women/mothers no favours and is denying a reality for most of us.

Just my two cents, but it’s not a requirement of the human condition to love babies. Some people authentically do not want them, but enjoy seeing them/being around them. And some people authentically hate them. Any disinterest in parenting or carrying a baby you’re seeing isn’t “pretending” and your insinuating that shows why people don’t want what they feel like is their (feminist, LGBT, or whatever) space invaded by “parenting” information, which is actually value-imposition and condescension. At the same time, I would be totally fine/happy/supportive of parenting columns or resources on Autostraddle/other LGBT websites, as long as they are respective of ALL people’s gender identities, sexualities, values, and life decisions.

What amanda said, because my guy reaction dealing with the questions of when I’m going to fulfill this “biological imperative” and make babies is quite exhausting (and eye-roll inducing). I crave for spaces that don’t push that mandate in my face but I do think there is space here in AS to include concerns and worries about queer baby making.

Besides, I got a lot of of this other than, “no thanks I’ll adopt a dog.” I found this nice and and thought-provoking.

This was actually really beautiful, and spoke to all the fears and feelings I have about one day trying to procreate (especially all the feelings about sperm. Gah, sperm. I really like to convince myself that by the time I’m ready to pop out a kid, that changing-the-female-bone-marrow-into-sperm thing will be an easy, accessible thing for lady lovers. I don’t like the thought of buying something that is the result of some random guy jerking off into a cup. Gross). I am SO happy for you that there was a happy ending, though. Gives me so much hope that it’ll all be worth it.

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